WordPress 4.4 includes a change that affects the scheduling of posts, or changing of a previously published post’s “publish date.”

The change causes a discrepancy between the date as specified in MarsEdit, and the date as recorded on the blog server. Specifically: the time specified in MarsEdit will be adjusted by WordPress, by the hours offset from GMT that your blog’s timezone is set to. For example, if your blog server is configured for New York (Eastern Time in the U.S.), then a post set to publish at 11:00PM tonight will actually be published at 4:00AM tomorrow morning. You can find your blog’s time zone setting from the WordPress admin panel, under “General” settings.

When I went to investigate the problem on WordPress’s bug-tracking system, I found an existing report which covers the issue as it affects WordPress’s own Android app. Hopefully the significance of this issue will motivate the folks who introduced the change to reconsider their approach, and to restore proper functionality to clients including MarsEdit and others.

In the mean time, a workaround is to proactively adjust for your GMT offset when setting a post’s date in MarsEdit. If you want the post to go live at 11:00PM tonight, and your blog’s time zone is in New York: schedule the post for 6:00PM instead. After your post is published, you can confirm the actual scheduled time in the published posts list in MarsEdit, where the date column should show the expected 11:00PM.

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